Sidetour acquired by Groupon

Sidetour, a marketplace for curated experiences, has announced its acquisition by Groupon. The full press release is below:

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The most important decision each of us makes is how we spend our time.

This is the guiding principle behind SideTour. For our hosts, it’s about creating a place where they can support their talents and passions by sharing them with others. For our customers, it’s about discovering new experiences and activities that create lasting memories and connections.

Small Team, Big Dreams

Our goal has always been to bring this vision to every corner of the globe. We shared this idea with the Groupon team when we first met them at our TechStars New York demo day, just two months after launching SideTour in August 2011.

After launching in four cities, our paths crossed this past spring. We partnered on some events this summer, having a handful of SideTour hosts offer their experiences at full-price on Groupon. The feedback from both customers and hosts was great. This also gave us a chance to get to know the talented team at Groupon and hear their vision for what is possible in the world of local commerce.

There is a ton of overlap in what we were both trying to achieve. And it became apparent pretty quickly that SideTour belonged at Groupon. That by being part of a company that’s in 48 countries and has more than 40 million active users, we’d be able to make our global ambitions a reality much faster than our small team could ever have imagined.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that SideTour is now a part of Groupon!

Our customers and our hosts have come to love SideTour, which is why our platform isn’t going anywhere. Even more new experiences will be added to sidetour.com every week. There will be time later to share more about what SideTour + Groupon means for our growing community, but in summary: it means a lot more people in a lot more cities will be joining in the fun.

It’s difficult to put into words how excited our team is. We’re all at SideTour because we believe that the world is full of talented people, and that there are countless experiences out there yet to be had. And at Groupon, we’ll be able to reach so many more people than we ever could on our own.

Making Every Moment Count

Life is short. And it’s important to make sure your time is spent meaningfully. At SideTour, my co-founders and I have been lucky enough to spend the past two years working with an outstanding team that we think of as our family, building a community of hosts and customers that we all think of as our extended family. Now we’re excited to become part of the Groupon family.

It’s been an incredible journey so far. This is just a short break to reflect. Tomorrow we take the first steps of the second part of this adventure. And I can’t wait to get started!